I have on several occasions experienced something that I think of as positive paranoia: this is when people believe that the universe favours them and looks after their interests, often by ensuring that they are in the right place at the right time and giving them things that they need.
The universe has often helped me to get a lot of good-quality reading material and to find specific books that I wanted for producing articles for this blog. Useful books that I didn't even know existed have also been put in a good position to attract my attention.
As a child I always lived close to a good public library, and one librarian told me that I could go down to the stockroom and take whatever I liked; then there was the occasion when I felt a sudden inner prompting to visit a small town in Kent, where I found a fantasy book by Sheri S. Tepper that I had long been searching for without success; there were also the books that had been put in the right place and at just the right height to ensure that I would see them as I walked past, including one by L. M. Boston.
Finding the right books 'by chance' and people who were helpful without even being asked are experiences of particular interest and significance to me. I found some examples of other people who were favoured by fate in this way in A Nursery in the Nineties (1935), an autobiographical work by the writer, poet and playwright Eleanor Farjeon.
Benjamin Farjeon and the helpful bookseller
Eleanor Farjeon tells us about something that happened to her father, Benjamin Farjeon, when he was a boy of 14 and working in the printing trade:
“On his way to the office, Ben had to pass a second-hand bookshop. Books were his passion, and he possessed none. In the shop-window one stood open, with two pages of reading exposed. One day Ben rose a few minutes earlier, so that he might read the pages, without being late at work, and, entranced, entered the world of Fouqué's Undine. The following day, he found the leaf had been turned; the next two pages were exposed, and he devoured them. The third day the same thing happened. While he was glued to the window, the old man who kept the shop came to the door.
“You're fond of books, my boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
"Come inside whenever you like, and read what you please from the shelves."
